


The Body of his Destiny

by linguamortua



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Baze Malbus is a colossal sap, Falling In Love, First Time, Galactic politics, Intercrural Sex, M/M, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Sophistry, Violence, homecomings, spirituality, this is impossible to tag
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-23
Updated: 2017-03-20
Packaged: 2018-09-26 09:50:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9884426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/linguamortua/pseuds/linguamortua
Summary: There is a political disaster brewing in the galaxy when Baze Malbus comes home to Jedha City after a self-imposed, decade-long exile. The ancient holy ground is shortly to become the epicentre of a punishing Imperial strategy to suppress anyone working for justice, peace and the light side of the Force. Baze feels compelled to protect his homeworld but, paralysed by nostalgia and guilt, he finds himself uncharacteristically unable to act.And then he finds Chirrut Îmwe. Or does Chirrut find him? Either way, a path begins to clear in front of Baze and he starts to walk it, as if he were destined to do so.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> _Fate followed her foreseen immutable road._  
>  Man’s hopes and longings build the journeying wheels  
> That bear the body of his destiny  
> And lead his blind will towards an unknown goal.
> 
> — Sri Aurobindo, [_Savitri (Part Two, Book Seven)_](http://savitrithepoem.com/component/content/article/41-book7/90-the-joy-of-union-the-ordeal-of-the-foreknowledge-of-death-and-the-hearts-grief-and-pain.html)

Jedha City is in the middle of a sand storm when Baze Malbus comes home.

It has been a decade, but he smells the familiar sand, the familiar air, before the city is visible through the flurries. Nearly half a klick from the towering west gate he closes his eyes against the sand and treads the path through muscle memory alone. The aching knot in his chest pulls him directly along the road and towards the gate’s menacing arch. Where he’s going he doesn’t need sight; he’s trodden every road in the city in his memory over the last ten years. He’s traced every possible route, seen every ancient building. Their particular typographies were long ago committed to memory. He has been away, but he never left.

The sand road changes to flagstones as he crosses the city boundary. Under the worn, thin leather of his sandals, sand crunches and slides. The howling of the wind has drowned out any other sounds and he feels quite alone. The streets, he knows, will be all but empty. Khamsin are common, but they almost always blow themselves out quickly. Everyone ducks inside and stays there, seeing no sense in fighting the inevitability of nature. _Jedha City_ , Baze thinks epigrammatically, _where the Force wills it._

A right turn on the corner by the bakery and up a gentle hill. If Baze opened his eyes now he would, just for a moment, see the far-off mountain framed perfectly between the highest spire of the temple and the sturdy, flat side of the grain counting house. He doesn’t look. He turns right again and feels the cracks in the flagstones where the path gets steep. The strap on his right sandal pulls on a raw patch of skin over his instep. He misses good boots, but he is trying to be unobtrusive. Anything that suggests off-worlder wealth is hidden away. His pack is heavy on his shoulders, too. Sand has worked its way under his robe and has started to chafe. Along the ridge, up and over, and then Baze pauses to remove his sandals.

He opens his eyes and tucks the flat sandals away in his pack. A steep descent awaits him. The path gets increasingly broken, chunks of stone crumbling away as he makes his way down into the Sink. At first the road is eerily empty, eerily quiet. Baze realises that the storm is passing away off into the east, leaving in its wake a sudden, uncanny hush. The city exhales with relief. People reappear. First the beggars, huddled into doorways and storehouses, and then the petty tradesmen and shopkeepers. Further down, there are many more beggars than shopkeepers. Nobody would bother Baze, but nonetheless he keeps a watchful eye for pickpockets. Not that he has anything worth stealing.

Down a side street he finds a lodging house and he pays for room and board with three small coins. A tired old woman garbed in black takes his money and gestures with a thin arm.

‘Take your pick,’ she says. He chooses a high bunk where he can see the whole room. He sits cross-legged, head bowed away from the ceiling, and spoons up his dinner. The goat meat is stringy but it is surprisingly flavourful. Besides, he isn’t picky about his meals. He falls asleep with the familiar taste of peppers and local herbs.

When he wakes it is still dark, but he hears the prayer bells ringing out and his body respond. The hard, painful knot under his ribs tugs at him again.

‘I don’t pray any more,’ he tells it under his breath, but he is already climbing down from his bunk.

The water in the bathhouse is only passing clean but he does his best, scrubbing his skin with a dessicated claw of soap and rubbing more through his mane of hair. About his clothes he can do little, but he shakes out the sand and beats his sandals together to dislodge the dirt. Today, immediately, he must find work. He should go now, walk through the Sink with his weapon prominently displayed and advertise his services.

And yet. Today. He wonders at the significance.

Already a handful of people are making their way towards the temple. All a little furtive, a little shabby. The wealthy—those that are left in Jedha, with its current air of desperation and inevitability—will rarely rise this early. Baze joins the stragglers. It’s the holy day of rejoining, of amnesty. Lost children returning home. There are songs about it. Baze has been lapsed longer than he cares to remember, but his feet are moving, once again, of their own accord.

He hovers on the temple doorstep and looks inside. It’s dark. Candles won’t be lit yet. He will be handed a lighted candle when he leaves. He can make out the figures inside—a long line of monks standing patiently against the back wall of the atrium. A wisp of incense reaches out and touches him and Baze inhales. Nostalgia hits him so hard that he has to turn away for a moment and brace himself. He braces himself. He steps inside.

For a moment he stands stupidly as someone else brushes past him. Then a hand on his arm rescues him.

Hello,’ says a voice, and Baze looks over. The monk has a smiling face and a freshly-shaven head and milk-blue eyes. A _grinning_ face, Baze notices. He notices quite hard. The monk pulls gently on Baze’s arm and guides him under a low arch and onto a wooden bench set against the wall. Baze goes with him, as obedient as a good, quiet child on temple day.

‘I’m sorry,’ Baze says as he sits, and stands up again. ‘I shouldn’t be here.’

‘Shouldn’t you?’

‘I’m not religious.’

‘All right.’ There are clay bowls of scented water at regular intervals around the room. The monk, kneeling gracefully, slides one over. He feels out for it with his hand first, carefully. ‘Sit, will you?’ Baze sits. He recalls, suddenly, the humble ritual of this day.

‘I don’t think my feet are very clean,’ he says, ashamed, but he slides his sandals off anyway.

‘What would be the point, otherwise?’ The monk guides Baze’s feet into warm water. His hands are gentle. He palms each of Baze’s heels in turn, then the calloused balls of his feet. The easy pressure of the monk’s hands push water in between his toes. Baze spreads them out, curls them under and relaxes them.

‘I’ve been away,’ Baze manages, breaking the strange silence that comes when a perfect stranger washes, with intimate care, one’s dirty and road-hardened feet. ‘For ten years.’

The monk doesn’t reply. He gathers Baze’s feet into his lap and moves the bowl away. With a dry cloth tucked into his belt, he dries them like a mother patting her baby dry after a bath. There’s a dark water stain on the monk’s red robes. Baze wants to apologise again. For the water mark, and for coming in the first place, and for his creaking, out-of-practice conversation.

The monk stands and stretches out his hands. Baze takes them, one in his each of his own, and lets the monk draw him to his feet. The man’s face grows serious.

‘Welcome home,’ says the monk, formally, and kisses Baze once on each cheek. He turns Baze around, once to the east, and once to the west. With ceremony, they process slowly to the door, where the monk reaches out with tortuous care and takes a tiny, red candle from a rack. He hands it to Baze, and their fingers get tangled as Baze tries to take it without burning himself or dropping it. The monk grins again, sun-radiant. ‘And I’m _blind_ ,’ he says, with gentle but unmistakable raillery. Baze ducks his head down until his damp hair curtains him. They stand there for a moment.

‘Thank you,’ Baze says, eventually.

‘Ask for me, when you come back,’ says the monk. ‘Chirrut Îmwe.’ He swallows the vowels with the laziness of a local boy and trills the r— _churrrut mmwe_.

‘Baze Malbus,’ says Baze. Above them, an acolyte accidentally rings a bell, and they both jump. Chirrut laughs.

‘See,’ he says, ‘the Force wills it.’

* * *

 By that afternoon, Baze is stripped to the waist and sweating down his back as he stacks bricks in a dilapidated courtyard. The owner lets him sleep there that night, locked behind a rusty gate, fed and watered. When he kicks off his sandals, he thinks he smells perfumed water. The next day, a woman pays him in coin to siphon off jar after jar of clear, astringent-smelling homebrewed liquor from a decrepit distilling unit. She insists upon smelling his breath after he finishes, mistrustful of his honesty. Baze tries not to visibly bristle. Her mouth turns down in a sour, wrinkled line and he thinks about the monk’s easy smile.

Work for a few days after that he finds by chance; he walks into a low-ceilinged tavern for a bite to eat and some small beer. He doesn’t leave. The proprietor takes one look at his weapon and his stance and offers him a job. So he leans up against the doorway, staff across his back and blaster on his hip, and keeps the patrons in line. It’s a moderately respectable place for the Sink, which is to say nobody is stabbed on a given day. He gets room and board and a little more besides. He thinks about all the things he did out in the world and out on other worlds. He thinks of what he could do. He takes the money. Every morning the prayer bells ring out, and the lump in Baze’s chest squeezes. His heart. That thing.

He doesn’t leave the Sink, although it would have made his mother happy if he had. Almost every day he looks up the long, broken path that leads to the safer, cleaner parts of the city. He can’t make himself walk past the temple, though.

‘What, Malbus, you’re going to shave and learn court dance and be a lady’s personal guard?’ he asks himself, lying on his low, firm futon one night. In the old store cupboard where he sleeps, there is just enough room to stretch out on his back. The door has a flimsy wooden latch, even. Wrapped in his fragile sense of privacy, he stares up at the ceiling and tries to imagine a lady. Or a woman. He is desperately lonely, but who isn’t?

Up in the morning, a day’s work for a day’s wage, down to bed at night. People all over the galaxy live that way. Baze should be grateful that he’s no longer earning his keep with his own blood and other people’s. It’s not that simple, though. The city stirs and roils. That’s what drew Baze back here. Rumours, at first, out at the edge of the sector. Greyshirts and troopers where they had no business being, acting like they had business being there. And then they did have business there; and their business became Baze’s business, and it was time to move on. Baze, an old lion, had a good sense of when to move on. And a good sense of his place in the larger scheme of things. All of which to say, the Empire was stirring, and when the sharks started nosing around it was wise to swim to shallower water.

Jedha City, ancient, holy, was just about the deepest water one could dive into.

Today, Baze has seen two things that concern him. One, a poorly-disguised Empire spy sitting in the very drinking shop that pays Baze’s daily wage. Two, a scrawled bit of graffiti on the back wall of a brothel: a crudely-drawn sigil of the Galactic Empire.

‘Galactic arseholes,’ a passing old man had laughed, spitting protectively at the base of the wall. It did look like an arsehole. It was unmistakeable, though, if badly drawn. So they were coming, then. A few years back a bunch of soldiers had torn down a temple on Suhkar, two boy-monks left trapped inside. An accident, it was said. There was outrage, and then everyone forgot.

Baze arches his back and scratches up between his shoulderblades. As a reckless youth he had been stifled by the crushing weight of Jedha tradition, how it cleaved to Force ways. Now, he is wise enough and honest enough to admit that the city could be a stronghold, of sorts. The past ten years have taught him that it’s better to be inside the stronghold than outside on the killing fields. A man more prone to self-preservation might long since have purchased a modest craft and made a home somewhere less _symbolic_.

Baze imagines the grinning monk trapped under millennia-old temple rubble, his gentle hands crushed by rock.

 _Churrrut mmwe_ , he mouths to himself, mimicking the man’s slurring low-city accent. Had they met as children, Baze would probably have thrown dirt at the boy while his friends laughed. How the galaxy turned class distinctions on their heads.

He lies awake all night until dawn seeps into the room. When the bells ring, he gets up and washes in his own basin of clean water. He walks up the path to the temple, dodging rickety speeders, and sits in the atrium, waiting.

‘Can I help you, brother?’ The aging monk is the perfect image of a retired Guardian—thin, paper-skinned but standing with surprising suppleness. He balances on the balls of his feet, warrior-like even in peaceful welcome. Baze stands up respectfully.

‘I’m looking for Chirrut,’ he says. ‘Îmwe.’ He hastily adds the latter so that no intimacy might be inferred. The old monk sighs with highly unmonklike weariness.

‘What did he do?’

‘Nothing,’ said Baze. ‘I was thinking of converting.’ The lie—the half-truth, then—comes easily. The monk raises his eyebrows.

‘Force preserve us,’ he says. ‘The boy improves. I’ll fetch him directly.’ He turns and paces into the heart of the temple, saffron robes swinging from his straight, thin back. Baze sits back down, baffled. The ‘boy’ must be thirty, easily. The same age as Baze himself. A light step, and Chirrut appears around the corner. He pauses in the arch, his head tilted to listen. One hand comes up to rest on the stone; framed, he is a picture of youthful devotion. The dark red robe of a man who has left the novitiate behind is wrapped around his hips, and a navy jacket is loosely tied over it. He is sweating lightly.

‘I’ve interrupted you, I think,’ says Baze. Chirrut’s face springs into delight, white teeth gleaming.

‘I am bound and required to make time for a convert.’ He emphasises the last word and Baze clears his throat awkwardly.

‘What was I supposed to say,’ he asks gruffly. It’s not as though he enjoyed lying to a monk in a temple.

Chirrut doesn’t reply at first. He comes across the floor. He really is sweating; Baze’s eyes drop to the bare triangle of chest on display. He’s not sure that the man's blindness will stop him from getting caught looking.

He’s right.

‘The foot-washing is really an annual thing,’ says Chirrut, airily, ‘if that’s what you were here for. What _were_ you here for?’ He sounds genuinely curious.

‘I don’t know,’ says Baze.

‘Mm-hm.’

‘It wasn’t to convert, all right.’ Baze feels prickly and annoyed. He goes on the attack. ‘The older monk thought you were in trouble.’

Chirrut laughs easily, throwing his head back. ‘What kind of trouble would I be in?’ Baze imagines peeling Chirrut’s loose navy jacket down off his shoulders, slowly, unwrapping him. He is acutely aware that he is standing on holy ground. He wonders what Chirrut’s sweat tastes like.

‘Let’s walk,’ he says, ‘somewhere.’ He extricates himself from trouble.

‘In the gardens?’

‘Fine.’

Trouble leads him through the atrium and down a long, cool corridor. In the near distance, Baze hears the cracking of practice staves. Someone is calling directions; the staves meet in time with one another. They come out into a shaded courtyard and Baze sees a two parallel lines of young men working the staff forms in perfect unison. An older man in saffron yellow calls the name of each form. Baze trained in something similar. He slows down and evaluates, out of a professional curiosity. The young Guardians are superb, of course. He wonders how Chirrut fares—might fare—without the rigid control of the training ground.

They walk down a steep set of steps, and abruptly they are in a fresh, green paradise. Baze stops and stares. The temple gardens are built on a hill, irrigated somehow, bright with plant life and little birds.

‘I’m told it’s very picturesque, if you like that sort of thing’ says Chirrut ironically.

‘I do,’ Baze says. He slides one foot free of its sandal and presses it against the grass. ‘Must be the greenest place in Jedha.’

‘It is.’ Chirrut sounds proud—perhaps prouder than it’s seemly for a monk to be. ‘It should be, the hours I spent weeding and watering it as a novice.’

‘Peaceful.’

‘Very.’ Chirrut turns his face towards Baze for a moment. ‘Which is what you came for.’

‘Isn't that everyone’s reason for coming to the temple?’

‘I came here to fight,’ Chirrut says cheerfully. ‘I was young and angry.’

‘So was I,’ Baze says, ‘just found my fights elsewhere.’ They crunch their way across a gravel path. The path, white-stoned, twists and curves through the garden. They haven't been following it in the slightest.

‘Where have you been?’

‘What?’

‘You said you went away.’

‘Oh,’ says Baze, stupidly. ‘Around NaJedha, first. And then around the system. And I just kept going for a while.’ He bites his lip against the hard knot in this chest, which thumps suddenly and insistently. He forms the next sentence very carefully and measures it out, pays it out evenly like a rope. ‘My mother died.’ He is satisfied with how it sounds: controlled and pragmatic. Chirrut isn't fooled. He reaches out and gives Baze’s hand a quick squeeze.

He doesn't say anything sympathetic, which is comforting.

‘Anyway, it got dicey out there,’ Baze hurries on, only moderately bending the truth, ‘and it felt like a good time to come home.’ He extricates his hand.

‘Force is stirring,’ Chirrut says soberly. ‘Everyone says so—the galaxy’s twisting with it.’ He plucks at his jacket front and turns his face out towards the city. ‘It makes me want to get out there and do something.’ Then he laughs, short and bright. Guardians of the Whills are rarely called upon to travel far from Jedha City. Particularly not young monks.

‘Aren’t you sequestered away, anyway?’ Baze throws Chirrut a line so that he can reel himself back to their little island of quips and barbs.

‘What, for my own protection?’ Chirrut gestures to his body. His muscles ripple under his collarbone just where his jacket is open. The island tilts.

‘Hmm,’ Baze says, not daring to respond.

‘Top floor, third window from the left,’ Chirrut says, waving his hand off behind him at the long, plain building tucked away behind the grandiose temple facade.

‘No shutters,’ Baze finds himself saying. ‘Bad security.’

‘Anyone could just walk in,’ Chirrut agrees. He stretches out a hand and lets it run over a frond of fern as they pass by. ‘Do you always assess temples for weak points?’

‘Habit,’ says Baze. ‘Don’t they teach you strategy here?’

‘No-o,’ says Chirrut, slowly. ‘Maybe. It’s all very spiritual, you know, the works of An Lau, know your enemy, channel the Force.’

‘Sounds questionable,’ Baze grunts, imagine trying to channel the Force when three men with blasters are trying to kill you.

‘You’re supposed to be able to see your opponent’s next move in his eyes,’ says Chirrut.

‘How does that work for you?’ It slips out of Baze’s mouth on a wave of discomfort. Chirrut gives a happy laugh.

‘I’ve never tried it,’ he says. ‘Never been in a real fight.’

‘So, not that kind of trouble?’

‘Not yet.’ Chirrut’s face is turned up to the early morning sun. He is bathed in red-gold and—Baze lets himself think it—beautiful. He would like to make some kind of confession. In a holo or a book it would happen that way. He’d say, _oh, I came back to see you_ and that would be that. The inconvenient temple vows would melt away. Instead, he says something unkind.

‘Get a girl pregnant?’

‘Wouldn’t know how,’ Chirrut says flippantly, after a short hesitation. He picks his way across a curving line of stones forming a barrier between grass and ferns. Baze follows at a distance. He recalls his childhood habit of casual cruelty towards pretty girls. At the bottom of the garden, Chirrut stops at an ornamental pond and dips a hand in. From behind, his spine curves leftwards in a graceful arc, his wide sleeve hanging down. Baze examines his profile as he catches up. There are fish in the pond. They bump and nose around Chirrut’s fingers, no bigger than his palm but fearless. Baze is being utterly ignored, which he deserves. He sits on the edge of the pond on a band of flat stones and waits Chirrut out.

‘Apparently,’ Chirrut says eventually, ‘I’m not good with authority.’ Baze wants to ask what kind of authority he, Baze Malbus, is supposed to represent, but as the words form on his tongue he realises that Chirrut is answering an earlier question.

‘I didn’t mean,’ starts Baze, although of course he did.

‘Of course you did,’ Chirrut says matter-of-factly.

‘Sorry.’

‘Well, we holy types are supposed to be forgiving.’ Baze could generate an excuse for his behaviour—he’s out of practice, he’s been fighting for his life a lot lately, he’s thrown off balance by Chirrut. He doesn’t. Excuses are a weak choice.

‘Should have to be forgiving,’ he says gruffly, instead. ‘Should hold my tongue.’ Chirrut favours him with a smile.

‘So why did you come back to the temple?’ he asks. Canny—Baze has no choice but to respond or commit unspeakable churlishness. Some deeply ingrained part of him feels a pang of shame at being chided by a boy—a man—with a broad Sink accent and no pretense about it. This is a punishment he deserves, though, and both he and Chirrut know it.

‘You,’ he says. He can’t look at Chirrut when he says it. He hears the pond ripple, and Chirrut is shaking off his arm in the sun and adjusting his loose jacket. A bell rings out three times; Baze’s heartbeat ticks a little faster, but Chirrut is unconcerned. When one lives by a series of bells and rituals, Baze knows, one learns to anticipate them.

‘Monkly duty calls,’ says Chirrut wryly.

‘Scrubbing floors?’ Baze asks, pressing on the soft, tender new link between them, daring Chirrut to lapse in forgiveness.

‘Peeling vegetables, actually.’

‘Don’t you have novices to do that?’ They walk along the perimeter of the garden and through a tiny, low door. They both have to duck to pass through it.

‘They’ve all been remarkably well-behaved lately.’

‘You’re on the naughty list again, then.’

‘The joke’s on the Temple Father,’ says Chirrut, ‘I love peeling root vegetables.’ Baze laughs and it echoes through the whole corridor. Two passing novices stare with unabashed curiosity; Baze glowers until they scurry on. The panicked slap-slapping of their sandals on the floor makes Chirrut laugh, too.

‘Rude pups,’ Baze grunts. They come back through the atrium and stand under the vast, sweeping arch of the door. Right back where they started, and just as uncomfortable about it. Some strange, alchemical reaction is occurring in Baze’s chest, and he is hot with it. He dislikes the feeling extremely. His equilibrium, never all that steady, is wildly off. Words fail him so he stands and waits for inspiration or rescue.

‘I'll see you, then,’ Chirrut says with casual confidence.

‘Sure,’ says Baze neutrally.

‘You know all the obvious entry points, for one.’

‘Like the front door,’ agrees Baze, slapping his palm against the enormous, chained front doors that stand always symbolically open.

‘That, too,’ Chirrut says, and he grins in a fashion that no monk should ever know. He turns and walks away without a goodbye. Baze watches him, and watches, and doesn’t go. Compulsion grips him; he doesn’t want to lose a scrap of a minute of watching Chirrut. At the far door, Chirrut pauses. He bends gracefully to slide two fingers under his left heel and brush something out of his sandal. As he does, he says in a quiet voice, just loud enough to reach Baze’s ears. ‘Monks sleep and rise with the sun, by the way. You might try that, as a form of spiritual exercise.’ And then he disappears back into the shadowed recesses of the temple corridors.

It’s been a very long time since Baze has been flirted at, but he thinks he still recognises what it looks like.

* * *

Baze has wrapped his blaster in a piece of rag, and tied his pack firmly. His sandals are off, and his sleeves folded up securely so as not to snag or catch. The gritty surface of the stone should be easy enough to navigate, riddled with cracks and old mortar as it is. He appraises it. He’s sneaked over plenty of walls in his time. A glance up and down the street confirms it to be entirely empty at this time of night and—

‘Damn,’ he whispers to himself, and flings himself at the wall. At the top, he stretches his long body out along the stones to avoid being an obvious silhouette. He pauses and evaluates his position. He’s sneaking into a temple at night. There is no possible defense. His coin purse is tied tightly and double-wrapped to stop it from clinking. This is entirely premeditated, and executed with all the skill of a freelance assassin and thief. He rolls and drops near-silently to the earth inside the temple grounds.

The monks, good citizens and upstanding men, are asleep. The temple is absolutely silent. Baze waits for a moment anyway, waits for a call or a light or the movement of a guard. Armed, trained, fighting monks, he reminds himself. Chirrut’s easy, panther’s grace comes to mind. Dangerous monks. He crosses an unsettlingly empty courtyard and skulks into the shadows. Carefully, quietly, he makes his way to the dormitory building. For a few luscious moments, he walks across dew-laden grass in the gardens, and then he’s there, standing at the foot of the three-storey building and counting windows.

In the still night, every sound will travel. Baze presses the damp sole of each foot to his robe in turn, rubs some sand on his hands and begins. It’s an easy climb. At the third storey he stops, clinging like some small lizard to the stone, and recounts the windows. He wraps his hands over the window ledge and silently heaves himself up. A fall from this height would be moderately damaging but exceptionally noisy.

The window has shutters but they are pulled back. Baze brushes through a layer of fine netting, and a curtain. Someone is breathing gently and rhythmically. It’s too dark to see much.

‘Hey,’ whispers Baze into the room, feeling absurd. Announcing his presence violates every rule of good sense. The breathing hitches and changes. Skin and fabric shuffle and two soft taps announce feet hitting the floor. Baze holds his breath, frozen by the window. Steps pad towards him. When a pair of hands touches his chest, Baze almost makes a sound.

‘Well,’ comes Chirrut’s low voice through the darkness. ‘That’s my reputation in tatters.’

‘Easy virtue,’ Baze manages to say through a rush of relief. His eyes start to adjust to the dark and he can make out, vaguely, Chirrut’s form. The room has a very particular smell, which Baze realises is Chirrut’s; a trace of faded incense, warm, sleepy skin, soap, the dusty smell of the old temple walls.

‘At least I’m not the kind of man who breaks into temples at night,’ retorts Chirrut, with surprising vigour for a man still half-asleep and whispering. He cracks a yawn. ‘Come to bed,’ he says and Baze, reeling, complies. Chirrut has a handful of Baze’s robe, up by his chest, and Baze lets himself be guided across the floor. He slips his feet free of his sandals and sets down his pack and weapons.

Chirrut folds himself down onto the bed. It is set into a deep recess in the rock wall and covered over with something folded — not silk, but a woven fabric that Baze cannot identify. Now that his eyes have adjusted, Baze can make out the contrast between the dark bedclothes and the long, light line of Chirrut’s bare back. He says something very fervent to himself, and unbelts his own robe, letting it fall to the floor.

‘This is the kind of thing my mother would have something to say about,’ he says, even as he climbs into the womblike bed and lets the curtain fall shut behind him. Chirrut huffs a little noise, a half-asleep laugh. He turns, throws one warm, strong arm over Baze’s waist and buries his face into the pillow under Baze’s chin. In a moment, he is asleep again.

A week ago, Baze was battling his way into the city with sand whipping at his skin. He was scratching in a dubiously clean flophouse and cracking together the heads of misbehaving bar patrons. Now he is curled up in a sweet-smelling room with a man so strange and beautiful and infuriating that Baze has the vague sense of hallucination. They are pressed together, bare-skinned, from shoulder to hip. One of Chirrut’s feet rests against Baze’s ankle. Baze, over-heated from his climb, can hear his own heartbeat in his ears.

He wonders what it would take to shatter the blown-glass fragility of this particular moment. With a gentleness that he had thought had been scoured out of him, he lets his bearded face rest against Chirrut’s warm, bare scalp, and breathes him in.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _He saw it everywhere._  
>  The inevitable folding of a wave,
> 
> _The patient flood of lava_  
>  Traveling toward him.
> 
> Matt Rasmussen, [_The Wave_](https://muse.jhu.edu/chapter/989623)

At first, Baze walks around on edge, as if a pair of eyes is boring a hole into the vulnerable place between his shoulderblades. He recognises this to be a psychosomatic artefact of a guilty conscience. Still, the rogue sensation that the Temple Father’s crinkled old gaze is tracking him around the Holy City is unnerving.

He left Chirrut before the dawn, nudged out of a fitful sleep by the monk’s surprisingly sharp elbows. Nothing had happened. Nothing, that is, but unlawful entry, trespassing, illicitly climbing a temple dormitory block and, the least innocent of all, lying pressed half-nude against Chirrut all night. _Nothing._

‘You’ll be back,’ Chirrut had said, grotesquely cheerful in the barely-grey pre-dawn light. Baze had snorted.

‘You can’t read the future.’

‘I can read you. Anyway, the Force—’

‘—wills it,’ Baze had finished. He already had one leg out the window. He was acutely aware of why Guardians of the Whills required no temple guards. Every last damned one of them was a temple guard. He had had ample opportunity to feel the power of a Guardian, curled against Chirrut and feeling the gentle flex of his shoulder and arm whenever he shifted in his sleep. Baze’s own left side was stiff; he had hardly dared move all night. If he closed his eyes he could still perfectly recollect each place Chirrut’s body had touched his, warm and yielding. Chirrut had seemed to sleep like the dead, utterly trusting of Baze.

If loneliness is an unlikeable state to be in, Baze abruptly finds that intimacy is yet more frightening. A sensible man would take the forbidden night, tuck it away in his memory and then settle down — to work, to make a life. Baze, starved for so long, finds he has no way to stop himself from waiting until dark so that he can once again make his way up the hill to the temple. He got lucky the first time, despite his skills. Sooner or later, he will get caught. There are so many ways that it could happen.

He scans the tiny tavern, idly watching for those infinitesimal cues of posture that tell him someone is about to start a fight. Nothing. This work gives him far too much time to think. In a quiet moment, the proprietor jerks his thumb towards the back entrance, allowing Baze respite. He takes it, standing out in the back alley with a clay mug of beer and some questionable dried meat. Through the still, warm air, the smells and sounds of the Sink are uncomfortably present, which does not improve either the warm beer or the food.

It is unclear whether his state of tension is fully warranted. He is waiting for something, yes—some momentous event or occurrence, some permission to act. The rumours, the graffiti, the great, seismic shifts of the galaxy; all have meaning. All are signals. Once upon a time, Baze would have had allies. He would have known who to contact. Two people are stronger than one—he stamps down the image of Chirrut’s face that swims into focus in his mind’s eye—ten better yet. A loose alliance of informed Jedha City folk, networked and braced for the coming storm, would be ideal. Baze knows how guerilla warfare works. These days, though, he couldn’t get an audience with a local butcher even if he knew who to approach. Who you know is key — a cousin, a family friend, a connection by marriage is needed. Baze’s network mostly died with his mother. (A pang, which he ignores.)

The Temple Father, no political slouch, is a redundant choice. He may be informed, but doctrine prohibits him from making the first move. And who else? Saw Guerrera? An almost mythic figure these days, possibly dead. Some hazy, unlikely rumours of an off-world rebellion. Leia, the Tigress of the Skies, exiled. No, dead; no, run away with her brother, Luke. In the absence of any alliance, the Galactic Empire is going to sweep away all small-scale resistance.

The temple bells chime midday, and Baze shivers.

‘Shut up,’ Baze tells the bells, to the surprise of a passing vagrant, and he retreats back inside. Maybe the Force really does will it. Or maybe, as Baze has always suspected, he is becoming sentimental in his middle age. Neither is an attractive option. He gets on with his job, pretending it is enough to keep him occupied.

* * *

Baze has made the careful journey from the Sink’s least desperate tavern (up the hill, over the temple wall and through its gardens, up the side of the dormitory block) and into Chirrut’s arms twelve times in the past month. Tonight is the twelfth, and Chirrut reminds him of that fact in a gleeful whisper as Baze drops his robe on the floor and slides into the warm bed.

‘Twelve is a very symbolic number,’ he whispers into Baze’s neck, nuzzling him in welcome.

‘Don’t get up,’ replies Baze nonsensically. ‘Don’t meet me at the door or anything.’

‘You didn’t use the door. But didn’t you hear me? Twelve is a symbolic—’

‘I heard. I think I learned a song about it when I was small.’ Baze is more abrupt than he would like to be, but he is especially tired tonight, tired and heartsick. The Sink is grimier and poorer than he recalled from his youth, and to watch prematurely ageing men drink themselves into destitution each day is taking its toll. He catches the smell of himself and grimaces, pushing himself away from Chirrut.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘I want to wash,’ he says, swinging his feet to the floor. ‘Is there water?’

‘By the window,’ Chirrut tells him. There’s a shallow bowl there. The water is cool and clean and smells faintly herbal. Baze removes his loose trousers, his back to Chirrut’s bed and his face heating with embarrassment, and kneels to wash himself face to feet. He does it with his hands. He stands by the window to air dry afterwards. He hears a rustling, and then the brisk swish of a match. Behind the bed’s layers of curtains, a little orange light flickers to life. It guides him back. Chirrut must have procured it specially, secretly, so as not to arouse suspicion.

‘Sorry,’ says Baze gruffly when he comes back to bed, and he sighs. ‘I’m a tramp, these days.’

‘Did you know I took a vow of poverty?’ Chirrut asks. They lie shoulder to shoulder, flat on their backs. There’s just enough room.

‘Some poverty,’ grunts Baze. Chirrut’s little room is modest but appealing; a soft mat and layers of covers on the strange, shelf-like bed; wash water and candles, a mirror. Some clay tablets marked with ridged characters, made with a stylus in the old way, and flowers from the garden. It is scrupulously clean and a besom broom stands in one corner. He knows that the monks weave their own cloth and dye it into the appropriate colours. Chirrut’s dark red and navy blue is hardly finery, but it is in excellent repair.

‘Well, none of it strictly belongs to me,’ Chirrut argues amiably. ‘If I left, I’d have to throw myself on the mercy of some worldly fellow, you know.’

‘If you left.’ Real life yaws unpleasantly, intruding into their little nest.

‘I’m not thinking about it,’ Chirrut says.

‘Aren’t you?’

‘I’m always thinking about it, a little,’ Chirrut confesses. ‘I wouldn’t go, though. I think.’ He pauses, and continues in a strange voice. ‘If I left without permission, I wouldn’t really be a Guardian of the Whills any more.’

‘Unspeakable,’ Baze says. Chirrut stiffens.

‘Don’t make sport.’

‘I meant it, though,’ says Baze. He articulates with great effort. ‘It’s a part of you. It’s who you are.’ He rubs the flat of his palm down Chirrut’s forearm. Chirrut settles. His body curls against Baze’s, two half-circles fitting together. As always, Baze’s body starts to respond, heating, stiffening. Chirrut must know about it; indeed, many nights Baze has lain awake with his mind racing, feeling Chirrut’s breath against his skin and the swell of Chirrut’s cock, ebbing and flowing as he dreams. Although Chirrut seems always to sleep like the dead, Baze is fitful when they are in the same bed, kept agonisingly awake by his almost-intimate knowledge of Chirrut’s body.

Chirrut’s mind is on weightier matters tonight, it seems.

‘I worry that I should be doing more. I used to think that this was enough, but the more I think on it, the more we seem so insular.’ The pillows rustle and Chirrut turns his head to look at Baze. ‘Everything you’ve told me about what’s happening out there. What might happen here.’

‘Don’t worry yourself,’ Baze says. ‘Let me worry about it.’

‘I’ll worry a bit.’

‘Tell me about the symbolism thing — twelve days.’

‘Oh, you know — the Force took twelve days to coalesce into being, there were twelve Jedi, originally, twelve points to the Temple’s outside walls, twelve days of fasting and prayer before the darkest night of the year. Usually, twelve days is a significant period of time before a religious event. Preparation or repentance and whatnot.’

‘And whatnot?’ Baze asks, amused.

‘Are you the monk or am I, hmm? Anyway, then there’s some kind of celebration.’

‘Right.’ It’s coming back to Baze, now, the rhythm of Temple life that his mother was so in tune with, and that he so early rejected. ‘So we should celebrate.’

‘Exactly,’ says Chirrut. He rolls over onto his belly and sprawls over Baze’s bare chest. ‘I have some ideas. If you want to hear them.’ He grins, and his teeth are white in the dark. Very deliberately, he runs his fingertips across Baze’s right nipple until it pebbles.

‘I thought,’ says Baze, his mouth dry suddenly, ‘that Guardians were celibate.’ Chirrut’s hand stops for a moment and he tilts his head, considering.

‘Well,’ he says. ‘Technically. It’s complicated.’

‘Technically,’ Baze repeats.

‘The scripture states that if one’s fleshly form is violated, it dampens your connection to the Force. One’s ability to feel kyber.’

‘Violated,’ Baze says.

‘It’s a loose translation.’

‘And it means…?’ Baze’s fingertips wander down Chirrut’s spine, feeling each bump. Chirrut shivers, and his voice hitches a little when he says—

‘Penetration. The Jedi actually swear off all attachments—ha!—but who else cares about that?’

‘Pene—’

‘Is repeating yourself a mnemonic thing, is it helping you understand, or—’

‘Can I fuck you or not, then?’ says Baze.

‘That depends on your definition of—’

‘ _Chirrut_.’ Baze is painfully hard, and painfully desirous of an answer.

‘I think,’ Chirrut says, with the measured air of a man about to commit sophistry, ‘that as long as you don’t penetrate me with anything, that you’re not actually violating my fleshly form.’ He gestures to himself as he says it.

‘Right,’ Baze says, ‘so, this is Temple-approved, then.’

‘Anyway,’ Chirrut hurries on, ‘what if _I_ wanted to fuck _you_?’ He stutters over the word ‘fuck’, and by the light of the tiny candle Baze sees him blush.

‘Did you want to?’ Baze asks.

‘No, but,’ Chirrut says, unable to finish the sentence. Baze chuckles.

‘There are lots of things we could do,’ he says, his voice thick. Baze hears Chirrut swallow hard, the click of his throat, and he reaches a hand up to the back of Chirrut’s neck to pull him in closer. He brushes his lips over Chirrut’s half-open mouth. It’s the first time. Their breath stutters together.

Against the soft slide of cloth-on-cloth, Baze is hard and feels electric with desire; Chirrut, too, is rubbing slowly against Baze’s thigh, breath coming fast. In his travels from world to world, lonely and isolated, Baze has fallen into bed with plenty of people. It isn’t difficult. There are men and women in droves who respond to a broad pair of shoulders and a studied sort of taciturnity. He likes the anonymity and the easy satisfaction of being clear: _this is what we will do, and how, and then we will go our separate ways_.

Never has he had to be cautious like this; never has someone shiveringly kissed him for the first time as if he, Baze, were something more than a second warm body in a bed. Never has he had to hold himself back from coming—somewhere, buried very deep, a teenage version of himself thinks _Force let me hold out, Force don’t let me embarrass myself_. He dares not kiss Chirrut any more deeply. His hands stay where they are, one on the back of Chirrut’s neck and the other resting on Chirrut’s tight-muscled forearm. He breathes as steadily as he can and tries to focus his attention inwards, like he would in a battle meditation. Even os, he groans against Chirrut’s mouth, the sound startlingly loud in the quiet room. Chirrut saves him; as Baze shifts one leg, his underclothes part and their bare cocks slide abruptly together. Chirrut gasps and rests his forehead against Baze’s. He makes a choking sound and comes, his arms losing their strength. With an utterly disarming lack of self-consciousness, he slides down onto Baze’s chest and stifles a happy laugh against the pillow. Baze finally moves his hands; he grabs at Chirrut’s ass, suddenly greedy, and rolls his hips up against wet cloth and skin.

When he comes, a flood of elation washes through him. He says something vaguely blasphemous in a weak voice, and Chirrut snickers. It makes Baze grin in response, light-headed and happy. They don’t speak; they don’t move. Chirrut’s weight is just heavy enough to be uncomfortable, but Baze doesn’t try to shift him. Instead, he closes his eyes and watches the colours flash and change behind his eyelids for a while. The real world recedes, blessedly. He’s content, he thinks, and possibly happy. Wondrous. He falls asleep.

* * *

The longer that Baze is home in Jedha City, the harder it is to avoid his past. People that he knew, or more usually that his mother knew. Baze knows that he has changed a great deal. In between his hair (long), his beard (grown in his absence) and the great bulk that developed in his chest and shoulders during his roaming twenties, he is surely unrecognisable. But when he passes someone on the street and knows their face, he shrinks in on himself and turns away, hoping to remain anonymous. What his mother would say, if she could see him now.

He could leave at any time; scrape together the credits and head back out into the big, cold galaxy. He could make his way. He thinks, fleetingly, about the cool, circulating air in a decent spacecraft as he sweats. Leaving would be the smart thing to do. Chirrut’s face swims into focus and away again. That’s been happening to Baze a lot, lately. It makes his desire to leave all but non-existent. It makes him feel significantly more guilty. That his strange urge, his loyalty to Jedha, has been superseded by a selfish wish to hover in Chirrut’s orbit.

As an—an assassin, Baze makes himself think—he had been rather lauded in certain circles for his powers of decision. A man of action. On Jedha, time moves like jelly, catching him up. Moving forward is such an effort.

Baze takes a drink and stares through the packed room and out the doorway, without really seeing anything. Behind him somewhere, a man is complaining in a puling, nasal voice. Through the chatter and hum, the voice starts to rise. It filters through and brings Baze back to the present.

‘... hundred credits the whole lot or they’d go somewhere else, and ‘course I had to say yes, me with three small children…’

Shopkeeper drivel, Baze thinks, annoyed to be so distracted. These petty people and their petty lives.

‘... bullying, I said, it was bullying, plain and simple, me a shopkeeper and them with Imperial weapons and…’

‘What?’ Baze says to himself, the man’s soliloquy really reaching him. He turns around. ‘What did you say, man?’ The man freezes in Baze’s view. He is small and nut-brown, his face dominated by an enormous beak of a nose. His mouth turns down in a particularly miserable way.

‘Oh no,’ the fellow says. ‘No, I’m saying nothing.’ Baze realises that the man thinks him some kind of informer. Any denial will just make him seem more suspicious, but Baze doesn’t need to say anything. He turns in his chair so that his back is to the door, and to the majority of the other patrons. Then he pulls his sleeve up a little. Standing out unnaturally white on his skin in the lasered-on symbol of an Imperial jail. In recent years, the Empire has grown heavy-handed—more so than historically. They catch you, they don’t both with tedious paperwork any more. In their fervent desire to establish order, their inmates far outstrip available Imperial personnel to handle the administration. Instead, they laser-brand you, tag your wrist with a timecode, and throw you in a group cell. If you’re still alive when your timecode expires, your next stop is the nearest trading port.

It’s not an experience Baze cares to repeat, especially as his brand entitles him to a fast-track trip to a labour camp next time.

The sigil’s significance is undeniable, and the ratlike man pales.

‘Listen,’ he says urgently, leaning forwards on his elbows. All trace of his shifty reticence is gone, swept away by the ghoulish reality of Baze’s laser brand. ‘Listen. They walked in like they owned the place, making demands. Demanding, just like they were better than us.’ His companions nod sagely—better than _us_ , those outsiders. Parochial, prideful little people, they are.

‘What do you sell, fellow?’ Baze asks.

‘Sundries,’ says the man evasively. ‘A range of useful objects for the man about town.’ He looks knowingly at Baze; weapons, then, many of them most likely questionably legal. Bootlegged or hacked technologies, smuggled goods and narcotics. Baze knows precisely the kind of vendor this man is. Knows that somewhere in the Sink, tucked away down an alley, will be a tiny storefront, windows hung with an array of goods which, while innocuous at first glance, will be ancient and dust-covered, untouched by the store’s particular clientele. When Baze was very young, it was a superb dare for a friend— _betcha can’t run into crook-shop, betcha scared_.

‘What did Imperial soldiers want with you, my friend?’ Baze asks quietly, more to himself than to the ill-favoured shopkeeper. Torn between a healthy respect for Baze’s battered appearance and the hustler’s desire to promote his wares, the man grumbles away under his breath.

‘... best in the Sink, not that I’d sell to Imperials, but they pressed me; self-preservation, that’s the thing, and anyhow no shame in making a living, none at all…’

Baze stands and shoulders his weapon, leaving half a cup of warm beer on the table.

‘Take me to your shop, man,’ he says, injecting his voice with crisp authority. The bench squeaks across the floor as the shopkeeper stands. He looks like he might bolt. ‘Don’t do anything stupid,’ Baze advises him. In a flurry of sweat-stink and dusty robes, the man’s companions abruptly depart. Left alone, the man is easily corralled towards the door. With Baze lurking behind him, the man scurries down a crumbling side street, avoiding the cracked paving slabs with the air of a man who knows exactly where each is. Tucked behind a broad pillar, the crook-shop is precisely what Baze expects. He has to duck under the sagging door frame. The inside—dark, silent, musty—is filled with the specialist and the arcane hidden in plain sight between pawned dross.

He tours the store, trying to divine what might have been purchased. The proprietor is cagey; either he doesn’t remember or he isn’t talking. It’s hard to tell. It might be a little of both—Baze has seen men in states of fear forget details.

‘I don’t like this,’ he mutters to himself eventually, no closer to an answer.

When he leaves the store, the prickling feeling between his shoulder blades is back. He resolves to see Chirrut again soon. Tonight, if possible. He feels, perhaps sensibly, that every night might be their last.

* * *

‘Who knows?’ Chirrut says later, lying flat on his back next to Baze. They are too warm to hold one another, but the backs of their fingers brush between them. ‘Who cares?’

‘Me,’ says Baze severely. ‘You, too, if you’ve any sense.’

‘Fine, I care,’ Chirrut says. Baze knows he does. Even the least politically-aware Jedhan citizen knows that something is happening in the galaxy, and the least politically-aware Jedhan is a cynic the likes of which the Core worlds never saw. Politics is in the blood, here. Rumours fly, yes, but there are few who cannot recognise the motions of galactic tension in broad strokes, at least.

Baze asks aloud the question he has been mulling over all day.

‘What did those soldiers want that they couldn’t have brought with them?’

‘Why risk word getting out,’ agrees Chirrut.

‘Convenient, untraceable—or maybe they were looking for something they didn’t foresee needing.’

‘What kind of a shop was it?’ Chirrut asks with the curiosity of man not accustomed to the seedier elements of the world.

‘Oh,’ Baze says, ‘it’s not important.’ Chirrut snorts.

‘If you kick a man under the jaw in the right way, you can snap his neck,’ he says conversationally. ‘A staff thrust to the throat is a killing blow, too.’ Baze inhales to respond and Chirrut talks over him. ‘Guardians, Malbus. We guard.’

‘You’ve never been in a fight outside the training yard.’

‘But I will be.’

‘What does this have to do with—’

‘Don’t insult me.’ Baze rolls onto his side to look at Chirrut, who is managing to lie with his chin up in his air in the pose that dares Baze to disagree with him. Not for the first time, Baze takes in the lean, strong lines of his body, his calloused hands and the two little scars on his face. Eyebrow and chin, from staff blows. And Baze has seen Chirrut’s grace, and felt his strength, and witnessed the acute, Force-guided confidence with which he moves through the world. Chirrut’s eyes are closed. ‘Trying to shelter me isn’t of any use. You think I’m some innocent, that you have to follow behind me with a blaster and a stern face— _ha_. You’re not my bodyguard. Or my husband.’

‘I could be,’ protests Baze, and immediately brings his hand up to his beard as if to stuff the words back in. Chirrut’s grin is instant and obnoxious enough to start a bar fight.

‘You don’t have to _propose_ to me to win an argument,’ he says.

‘Will I ever win an argument with you?’ Baze asks rhetorically. Chirrut looks pleased.

‘Of course not,’ he says.

‘A thought came to me,’ says Baze slowly, changing tack. He shifts his weight in preparation.

‘A whole thought.’

‘Yes, a whole one, you wretched son of a womp rat,’ Baze continues.

‘Are you going to share it, or—’

Baze rolls and carries Chirrut over with him until they fetch up against the wall, Chirrut on his front and Baze on top of him. Baze tickles the back of Chirrut’s neck with his beard to make him writhe then, while he’s distracted, whisks away his underclothes. He spits into his hand. Chirrut sucks in a little breath and says, ‘remember, though.’

‘I remember,’ says Baze, who has never so much as let his tongue slip past Chirrut’s lips, no matter how much he has wanted to. No penetration; Baze Malbus can work with that. He lifts himself on one elbow and wets his cock in his hand. Holding his breath, he presses slowly between Chirrut’s thighs, up high where his skin is soft and warm. Their hips roll together, Chirrut picking up his rhythm. Baze closes his eyes and presses his face into the smooth valley between Chirrut’s shoulderblades.

Chirrut’s shoulders shake with muffled gasps, and his hands grasp at Baze’s. He is easy, so easy to take apart. Baze has made him come on himself several times on these night visits, each more delightful to bring about than the last. The look of him, the smell, the feel; Chirrut loses himself to pleasure with total unselfconsciousness. Baze adores it. He does it again, now, growling soft nonsense into Chirrut’s ear and putting his back into fucking between his thighs.

‘I would marry you,’ he says, as they tumble over the edge of orgasm together, clutching at each other and panting for air. ‘Just to teach you a lesson.’

Chirrut snorts and wipes his sweaty face on Baze’s arm.

‘Fine,’ he says, ‘but I don’t have a dowry, just so you know. I’m a very bad deal, economically speaking.’ He pauses. ‘And I eat a lot.’ Baze gets up to wash, attempting to stifle his laughter, and lets him have the last word. He waits to leave until the last possible minute, dozing with Chirrut until birds start their pre-dawn song.

* * *

Something jolts Baze out of a restless sleep, sweating and with his heart pounding. He is alone in the tavern’s repurposed store cupboard but he reaches out for Chirrut before he remembers where he is. With damp palms pressed to the ground, he levers himself up until he is sitting. His fine-tuned sense of threat tells him that something is horribly wrong. He waits, waits for some sound or sign, expecting an intruder.

A long, dirgelike wail starts up. Many voices howl in a desperate chorus, putting Baze’s hackles up. He is momentarily frozen in place. When the rational part of his brain once again starts working it supplies the answer—it is the temple’s mourning cry. They are grieving for one of their own. Baze’s heart seizes within his chest. He rolls to his feet and dresses in the dark, fumbling, rushing.

The keening comes again, almost undignified in its raw sorrow. As Baze leaves the tavern through the back door, he can feel a palpable sense of strained anticipation in the Sink. The sun is barely lightening the sky, but usually some early folk are up by now. Today, the streets are empty.

Never one to run to ground, Baze checks his heavy blaster and tightens one bootlace. He makes his way through the chill silence of the Sink and up into the better parts of the town, walking softly on the balls of his feet. He’s ready for trouble. He takes back alleys where he can, footfalls sounding loud in the city streets. Once or twice as he passes a door it closes, or he hears a lock slide into place. Sometimes the sounds of hushed discussions or weeping or angry, arguing voices reach him from windows or cracks in stone; and then up in the sky, the whine of interplanetary speeders echoes down to him.

At the Temple, the doors are barred closed and all the windows are hung with white cloth which streams and billows like smoke from a hundred chimneys. Baze treads the empty streets around in a circle. By the time the sun is fully up, a few people are clustered outside the doors awaiting answers, but the building remains resolutely closed. Only the endless sound of wailing from inside indicates that it is not abandoned. At almost noon, a red-clad delegation of priests make their way down from their respective chapels and churches, robes hung precariously from their high, boxy headpieces. They process, two by two, to the door of the Temple of the Whills, and one priest at the front of the line raps ponderously upon the door with his ceremonial staff. There is a hushed ripple of curiosity from the assembled cluster of Jedhans, but the doors open just enough to admit the visiting clerics and then slam closed again.

Eventually Baze takes matters into his own hands and scales the perilous back wall almost absently. With the Temple so occupied, he hardly looks around him as he makes his way up the gardens and up the dormitory wall.

A robe lies abandoned on Chirrut’s floor, and his bedclothes are in a state of anarchy. Not knowing what else to do, Baze folds everything away neatly. He walks around the room a few times. In the daylight, without the candlelight and the secrecy and the moon’s silvery glow, it feels rather shabbier than usual. He tries to distract himself by looking at the clay tablets and waxes upon which Chirrut has marked, or reads from. He wonders that the Temple is so averse to technology that they would make Chirrut work so hard for his learning. Or maybe Chirrut chose the harder path. It would be like him.

An hour passes, maybe, and another. As the day slides into afternoon, Baze’s nervous energy makes him nauseous and irritable alternately. He dares not leave, lest he miss Chirrut. The streets are still quiet, and from the window he can see the whole city, hanging in suspense. Two small Imperial craft pass over in low orbit and Baze grinds his teeth, wishing Chirrut would appear.

When Chirrut finally shows up, he bursts through the door and immediately turns his body towards Baze. Smelling him, probably; he can do that, and Baze is certainly sweaty enough. Chirrut’s face is wild, tear-stained. His staff is hooked to his back. A grim animation has gripped him, different entirely from his usual fluid movement.

‘You’re here.’ He flings himself at Baze and clings fiercely to him for a moment. His fingers dig iron-hard into the meat of Baze’s forearms and don’t let up.

‘What happened?’ Baze heard a multitude of rumours on the way to the temple, most of them clearly and wildly spurious. The Jedi had betrayed the Temple and sacrificed Jedha’s Father to save themselves. Saw Guerrera was back from the dead and punishing the monks for speaking out against him. No—the monks themselves had slaughtered their own pacifist leader and were preparing for war. All asinine, unfounded, but looking at Chirrut now, Baze could believe him ready to fight.

‘They pinned him out on his bedroom wall like a Fourth Age martyr,’ Chirrut says, spitting the words out. Nausea washes over Baze. He knows precisely the imagery, and even stripped down in carvings and old ink drawings it holds a deep horror for Jedhans; the body, pinned out in a cross shape, the viscera pulled loose and hung to either side in great, looping wings.

‘Psychological warfare,’ Baze manages to say, trying to drag himself towards practicality, to rationalise. It’s the kind of thing the Imperials have a taste for.

‘They left the—implements— behind,’ continues Chirrut. His hands make a shape, a gesture.

 _Don’t tell me_ , Baze wants to say, but Chirrut forges on, through his teeth.

‘Sacred daggers, looted from the Catacombs of Cadera.’ Baze stomach lurches.

‘That’s disgusting.’

‘Worse than disgusting.’

‘Deliberate,’ Baze says, the piece slotting into place in the murky puzzle—espionage, incursion, purchases, rumours, lies, and now this. A more symbolic assassination would hardly be possible. ‘Force help us, they went looking for horrors in our history and turned them against us.’

‘It was always about the kyber,’ says Chirrut. He furrows his brow. ‘As soon as word gets out, the Temple will become—’ He circles a hand, searching for the word.

‘Tainted?’ Baze suggests.

‘Something like. We’ll be alone. The people will fear retribution.’

‘I’ll bet any number of credits that the priests have already fucked off,’ Baze says, mentally calculating potential allies and enemies, as always.

‘ _I’m_ going to do something.’ Chirrut is crackling with energy. Baze has never been a sensitive, but he thinks that if he were, he’d feel the Force rolling off Chirrut in waves right now. And so much for his carefully-maintained atheism—even Baze can feel, in this moment, a great shift. The universe is aligning itself to flow directly through the tense, powerful conduit of Chirrut’s body. It’s intoxicating. Suddenly alive with potential, the City seems to Baze to be channelling magnetic energy as though a future is being spun, now, from a great mass of hypothetical universes.

‘They want you to do something stupid,’ Baze cautions. ‘To give them an excuse.’

‘Good,’ Chirrut says, and his chin comes up resolutely. ‘I’ll happily give them one.’ A curl of wind comes in through the window, rustling a dried leaf across the floor and playing along the hem of Chirrut’s robes. He seems to grow taller in front of Baze’s eyes, as if possessed.

‘Good, then,’ Baze agrees, hypnotised by Chirrut’s—what? Divine charisma? His hand tightens on his blaster. ‘What are we doing?’ Chirrut steps closer, ‘him’ becoming ‘they.’

‘I don’t know,’ Chirrut says, but he stretches out and feels for Baze, and Baze takes hold of his hand, ready to be led.


End file.
